ECHOLOCATION; A READING
Nickel van Duijvenboden
13 February 2016

 

Reading as part of the exhibition "gerlach en koop: Choses tuées"

In the summer of 2014 Nickel van Duijvenboden scribbled a long letter to gerlach en koop, not the first and certainly not the last, and dropped it into a postbox just off the Normandic coast. Enveloped in his message were the following lines: "On the stone beach, when facing the chalk cliffs and upon climbing the thick pebbles, you hear, precisely on the point reached by high tide - where the pebbles thus form a ridge - a very peculiar echo of shifting stone beneath your feet, a gnashing multitude, which re-echoes against the chalk rising up perpendicularly. A sound I think exists only here. I cannot shake the idea that we are similarly treading on what has already been done and thought, and are so creating a new disturbance in some immovable order, producing a strange and hollow gritting. A sound some might associate with nails on a blackboard. (...) Is this about not attempting to make up for an absence? Silence is unsettling, a crevice of unwarranted scenarios, speculations that subsequently reverberate and cause a howl of feedback."

Nickel van Duijvenboden (born 1981, The Netherlands) is artist and lives and works in Amsterdam. Until 2015 he was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In his works he explores the potentiality of a writerly artist practice.

Images
Nickel van Duijvenboden, 2016